Operation Shamrock: NSA’s First Domestic Spying Program Was Revealed by Congress in 1975

When asked if it was legal for NSA to read the telegrams of American citizens, the retired deputy director replied, “You’ll have to ask the lawyers.”

Operation Shamrock came to light in 1975 during investigations by the U.S. Senate into government intelligence abuses in the Nixon Administration. The committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), learned that three telegraph companies had turned over all their overseas communications traffic, both outbound and inbound, to the National Security Agency (NSA) on a daily basis for 30 years.

The spy program was initiated in World War II as part of the government’s wartime censorship program, but by the 1970s, political operatives in the Nixon Administration were using it to collect information on their political enemies:

In 1945, US Government SIGINT operatives met with representatives of the three main telegraph companies – ITT World Communications, Western Union International and RCA Global (both now part of MCI Worldcom) – starting Operation Shamrock, a 30-year illegal coordinated program to spy on the electronic communications of American citizens. The telegraph companies each night packaged up the day’s transmissions and handed them to operatives who sent them to NSA headquarters in Virginia [it’s actually in Fort Meade, Maryland – Ed.] for analysis. During the Vietnam War the NSA used the information gathered to compile a watch-list (Codeword: MINARET) of more than 600 “dangerous” Americans, including folksinger Joan Baez, paediatrican Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda and civil rights campaigner Dr Martin Luther King. The NSA claims in 1974 it destroyed files on more than 75,000 other Americans it illegally collected during Shamrock.

Shamrock and MINARET came to an end only in 1975 when they were uncovered by the Church Committee, the US Senate Select Committee into spy agencies.

Investigators for the Senate’s Church Committee included L. Britt Snider, who would later serve as a CIA Inspector General and more recently headed the 9/11 congressional inquiry for a short time — and Peter Fenn, who is now a regular on cable news pundit panels, ably representing the Democratic Party establishment.

In 1999, Brett Snider wrote a short essay titled “Unlucky Shamrock,” recounting the events that led to the revelation of the NSA’s first illegal domestic spying program. Snider recalls that the investigation started with a few fits and starts but eventually he came upon Dr. Louis Tordella, who was then in retirement but who had been a deputy director at the NSA where he had been very familiar with the Shamrock program:

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Did Rove Tell His Bosses He Expects to Be Indicted Next Week?

I can’t find another source on this, and Mark is skeptical, but what can it hurt to get in the Fitzmas spirit just in case it’s true:

Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources confirmed Rove’s indictment is imminent.

Within the last week, Karl Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to sources.

Details of Rove’s discussions with the president and Bolten have spread through the corridors of the White House where low-level staffers and senior officials were trying to determine how the indictment would impact an administration that has been mired in a number of high-profile political scandals for nearly a year, said a half-dozen White House aides and two senior officials who work at the Republican National Committee.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources confirmed Rove’s indictment is imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove’s situation. A spokesman in the White House press office said they would not comment on “wildly speculative rumors.”